Hello, and welcome to CoCalc.
CoCalc is a virtual online workspace for calculations, research, collaboration and authoring documents.
Your web browser is all you need to escape the confined space of your desktop and move to the cloud.
This guide explains the features of CoCalc in depth and shows how you can use them productively.

The main building blocks for working on CoCalc are Projects.
Create one or more projects in order to partition your work into separate workspaces.
Each project consists of files, accessible only to you and your
collaborators.

You and your collaborators can edit these files at the same time,
which means your changes are synchronized among all of you in real-time!
Depending on the type of the file, it allows you to accomplish a specific task.
They open up in their associated online editor and you start to work interactively in CoCalc’s environment.
For example, files ending in *.sagews are for working with [SageMath] in Sage Worksheets,
an *.ipynb file starts CoCalc’s implementations of the Jupyter Notebook,
and a *.tex file opens an editor for LaTeX documents.

Being online and in the cloud opens opportunities to share files and collaborate.
You can communicate with others in a chat room or on the side of a file.
This is especially useful in the context of teaching to help students.
Check out our Instructor Guide for more details about conducting a course on CoCalc.

Last but not least, the company “SageMath, Inc.” behind CoCalc needs your support to keep the service running and continuously improve it.
Initially, you start with a Trial Project with certain restrictions – most notably your project runs with lower hosting quality and has no access to the internet to download data from other servers. You can upgrade your projects at any point later.